The most important quote in this ambitious, epic work on Irish nationalism is in parenthesis, but it should have been the book's epigraph. It comes from The Poverty of Historicism, Karl Popper's critique of the Marxian notion that history runs inexorably and predictably towards a promised land: 'The belief in historical destiny is sheer superstition.'

For the philosopher's assault on Marxism, read Richard English's lucidly written dissection of nationalism in Ireland over the last three centuries. Like Popper, English does not believe that the forward march of Irish nationalism towards a new Celtic Dawn is inevitable or, in the case of idealistic republicanism, realisable. He notes a chasm between Irish nationalist politicians and modern Irish historians, the latter disputing the former's contention that there is a single narrative to Ireland's 'story'.

Early in the book, English advances the thesis that the reason for the modern Irish Republic having the highest rate of private property ownership per head on the planet can be traced to the 19th-century land war. Michael Davitt and the Irish radicals who fought to wrest control of land away from the Anglo-Irish ascendancy 'came to favour land nationalisation'. The author connects this radicalism with the syndicalism of James Connolly. However, the epic land battles didn't produce agrarian proto-socialism but, rather, through Gladstone's reforms, small-scale land possession among the peasantry.

He points out that in 1870, only 3 per cent of those living on the land owned their holdings, yet by 1929 only 3 per cent did not. Later advocates of nationalisation were to be let down in the Thirties by the very people they sought to liberate. The land war paradoxically created a socially conservative peasantry. So, according to English, thanks to Davitt, his comrades and Gladstone, we have the property-owning democracy of the 21st-century republic. English clearly admires the courage of Charles Stewart Parnell and the sub-religious fervour of Patrick Pearse, a leader of the 1916 Rising. His sympathies, though, lie with the constitutional wing of Irish nationalism, flowing back from Daniel 'the Liberator' O'Connell, to Parnell, John Redmond and John Hume.

He shows that, in the War of Independence, most of the 10,000 casualties were civilians. The parallels here with the Troubles are stark. Civilians on both sides also bore the highest number of casualties in what was portrayed as a people's national liberation. And just as English writes about 1921, so it was at the end of the last 'armed struggle': 'The outcome was hardly that of republican dreams: Irish unity was not won, and nor was full independence; social justice was not achieved, nor economic improvement quickly built.'

English asserts that partition was probably inevitable even before 1921, arguing that north-east Ireland's industrial revolution, the traditions of the unionist majority there and their willingness to fight left Lloyd George and the other British negotiators with little choice but to insist on it.

From then on, the book's theme can be summed up in a single word: futility. De Valera's economic nationalism, which turned Eire into a Gaelic autarky, forced tens of thousands to emigrate from the new state between the late Thirties and the late Fifties. The rump of the IRA that refused to follow de Valera and Fianna Fail into the Dail waged a series of doomed campaigns, the longest of which was the one put finally to rest recently, the Provisional IRA's battle to destroy Northern Ireland circa 1969-1998.

Arguably the most surprising aspect of this superb survey of Irish nationalism is its front cover, featuring an icon created by Bobby Sands and his fellow hunger strikers. It depicts a lark (an overused symbol of freedom in Sands's mawkish poetry) breaking free from barbed wire against the background of the Irish Tricolour.

On seeing this image in Sinn Fein bookshops across Ireland today, it would be understandable for true believers to pick up Irish Freedom expecting a homage to that unbroken lineage of martyrs forging Ireland's grand march. When they dig into the details of this fine work of scholarship, they will be deeply disappointed.